Page - 268 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

cHARLES hOPE268 analysis in the narrower sense, the former be- ing concerned with identifying the forms that the artist had represented, the latter with the subject-matter. For Panofsky, pre-iconographic description depended on practical experience and knowledge of the history of style, whereas iconographic analysis required knowledge of lit- erary sources and an awareness of the history of types. But Gombrich argued that the distinction was an artificial one, pointing out that “The very act of perception of forms and valeurs is governed and regulated by the steering force of recognis- ing and naming of subjects.” He conceded that “The first stage of iconographical interpretation, or let us call it the merely descriptive stage, is so simple that it is usually gone over as self-evident,” noting that we are accustomed to call interpreta- tion only answers to the question of what is rep- resented in the sense of what is illustrated, while we regard the descriptive stage as a mere matter of “seeing”. But he then reiterated the idea that “this distinction is somewhat arbitrary.” Panofsky, then, thought about iconography purely in terms of art-historical method, while Gombrich approached it as a problem of percep- tion. In particular, he pointed out that: “Art can only represent a fraction of an actual scene. All the rest, the direction of movement and its sense has to be hinted at by ways of symbolism. We need only compare an aver- age snapshot with any work of art represent- ing a similar event to become aware of these artistic means.” Given his approach, it was not surprising that the range of imagery that he discussed was much wid- er than that considered by Panofsky and Kurz, in- cluding the art of children, primitive art and sym- bols, as well as including a discussion of images as a type of magic. Underlying his argument was the recognition that an understanding of representa- tion involved a consideration both of the devices used by the artist and of the role of the spectator. Had the handbook by Kurz and Gombrich appeared in print in the 1940s, it seems possible that the approach to iconography made popular by Panofsky would not have held sway in the way that it did for at least thirty years. Gombrich himself evidently continued to think about the issues that he had addressed in his introduction. It is probably not by chance that in the same folder as his introduction is a sheet containing an outline of a book entitled The Realm and Range of the Image. He proposed this unsuccessfully to two publishers in 1947 and 1952, and their lack of enthusiasm must count as among the great publishing mistakes of the century. The book was to be divided into three parts: Image and Reality, Image and Meaning, and Image and Belief. Im- age and Reality, in turn, was to be divided into six sub-sections, as follows: 1. Introduction; the semantic approach 2. How we “read”pictures (the mechanics of visual perception) 3. How the artist builds up the picture (the role of the conceptual image in art teaching and drawing) 4. The sway of the conventionalised image in art (art and nature at rest and in motion) 5. The pictorial “cliché” and the documentary value of art 6. A new approach to aesthetic questions (style, caricature, distortion and expression, the “visual pun”). Image and Meaning dealt with a variety of top- ics, such as symbolic images, that is to say em- blems, cartoons and advertisements, hieroglyphs, allegories and so on. Image and Belief dealt with theological issues and the persistence of magical ideas. Many of the themes that Gombrich planned to address in this book were those that he would explore in much greater depth twenty years later in Art and Illusion, and some of them, notably “the role of the conceptual image in art teach- ing and drawing” would also be at the heart of The Story of Art. In the Preface to Art and Illusion